


no second troy

by thecatonlyknows



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Sibling Bonding, Sibling Love, You know the usual stuff, about god and the anthropomorphic personification of the void, and its obscure sibling gen no one cares about but me, anyway the only chuck in this fic is god, are god and chuck separate characters now or were they ever?, idk it's been a while since i caught up with the tangle web this show weaves, literally the only fic i'll ever write for this fandom, posting this was worth it just for that tag, siblings figuring out how to forgive each other for a millenia of heartbreak and betrayal, welp seems legit, you do you kid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-06-30 13:37:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15752772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecatonlyknows/pseuds/thecatonlyknows
Summary: "Why, what could she have done, being what she is? / Was there another Troy for her to burn?"Chuck and Amara work things out, or try to.





	no second troy

**Author's Note:**

> So...this has been sitting unfinished on my laptop for years now, and for some reason the urge struck me last night to finally wrap it up. And...I did. Enjoy? 
> 
> Summary quote is Yeats, No Second Troy.
> 
> Triggers: none actually, this one is pretty vanilla. Amara does try to eat a soul at one point? But that's also 100% canon, so you know...expect what you'd expect.

When her brother explains the concept of healing to her, Amara listens. It’s strange how easily they fall back into old patterns; his speech to her silence, his creations to her void. It’s strange how little she minds it, now.

Healing works like this, he says. It is taking parts of what had once been whole, and restoring them to that original wholeness. Or, at least, to something like the original—sometimes stronger, scarred. Organic matter seeks to heal itself after it has been damaged, remaking connections that have been torn and restoring health that has been lost. It is the way he designed life to function.

It sounds a deeply unnatural process to her, a reversal of the correct order of things. But Amara is willing to give it a chance, for him. It cannot be so very diffcult, if even his weeds and cockroaches can achieve it. He laughs when she tells him so, that low, self-deprecating huff, softer and sadder than she remembers from before. It makes something shiver up her spine just the same, that old spark of pleasure in knowing she had done this, she had caused that noise, had put that crooked smirk on his face. It was hers and no one else’s, just as he was hers and no one else’s.

But of course that is no longer true. It has not been true for a long time, not since he had dreamed up world after world of _someone elses_ to belong to.

She lets her brother— _Chuck_ , he reminds her, as she rolls her eyes—decide where to go.  She thinks at first that they will leave this little earth of his behind, bask together in the flare of dying stars and the sweet emptiness of the spaces between. But somehow, without her noticing, a small restless knot has tied itself, pulsing, in a spot that would have been just behind the breastbone of her fleshly form. She feels when her brother— _Chuck_ , he insists—notices it and gives it a nudge, quick and hesitant as if half expecting to be violently expelled for the presumption.

Instead, she asks, as she had asked him aeons before: _what is it called?_

 _Curiosity_ , he says. And then, … _would you like to see?_

Amara considers this. All of existence is theirs, and will wait. But this little ball of mud and desperation her brother has tended for so long—it has a beginning and an end, and that end will not wait forever, no matter how often his beloved apes succeed in delaying it. _Very well._

When she returns to her human vessel, it seems more comfortable than before. Less a cramped confinement than a gentle weight upon her shoulders, snug and almost pleasant. Like a blanket, her brother suggests.

A blanket?

He sends her a fuzzy-edged memory of _warm-wrapping-fleece_ on a chilly night.

Like a blanket, then.

So he takes her places. He offfers them up with a shy flourish the way the waiter at the restaurant they visit presents the various dishes of their dinner, _paté maison_ and _poulet aux porto_ and a dainty _creme brulee_ that cracks satisfyingly loudly when she stabs it with her equally dainty spoon.

First there are caves and crevices and glaciers, the curious red-hot currents of lava flowing beneath his planet’s crusty surface. Then seabeds and deserts, hard, quiet spaces where the fierce stench of life is dim and flickering. Her brother watches anxiously from the corner of his eyes as she contemplates the sharp edges of a cactus, the subtle curl of a tentacle. She keeps her silence, and so he grows braver, moving on to cities and forests and mountains, ships and towns, a festival of glowing paper lanterns, a night sky stained bright by fireworks. Everywhere has a name, often more than one, and he tells her all of them: Disneyland, مَصر, the Indian Ocean, British Columbia, 深圳, Αθήνα, Sierra de Levante.

Every thing, too: silkworm, blackberry, garnet-throated hummingbird. Northern lights and high speed trains and stepping stones. Tommy Allen the barkeep. Once she had been the only being in existence with a name: Darkness, her brother pronounced her, his first word. She never gave him one in return; Light had been his own invention. She had always thought _my brother_ was enough.

“These are roses,” he says, out loud for once, and hands her a bundle of velvety red things with long prickling stems. She accidentally crushes one in her hand when she reaches out to touch. It makes her freeze, suddenly and confusingly dismayed. But her brother smiles with his eyes and unclenches her fingers one by one. “Hold them to your nose,” he suggests.

Resisting the urge to sneeze, she breathes in and inhales an unfamiliar odor, piercing and sweet. “Roses,” she repeats cautiously, not wanting to get it wrong. The smile spreads from his eyes to the rest of his face. It reminds her of the sunrise they’d watched that morning, old and delicate and new, all at once. She pauses, then adds, “Thank you.”

Amara takes in all these different pieces of his—yes, _fine,_ Chuck’s—world with her careful furrowed stare, trying to understand. But understanding is still difficult, roses and all. You left me for this? she does not ask. This mess of rocks and fallen leaves, these trash-strewn streets, these small narrow humans with their grasping hands and grubby hearts? I was so little to you that I could be replaced by _this_ , and never missed?

It hurts, still. Perhaps always, for all that she has agreed to give this healing of his a try. Still, she continues to look.

 _You were always missed_ , Chuck whispers at night into her ear. The words curl through and around her like smoke, dry and burning, and she closes her eyes against the sting. _Always._

He brings her to a place named Kaua’i, a small green scrap of land nearly swallowed by sea on every side. Somtimes humans come here for vacation, he explains. Couples and families with children. It is considered beautiful.

She likes the sea the best, so far. It reminds her of the before-time, the stretch and ease and formlessness of existence when it had been of and for just two. One pair alone, with no need for the strange, itchy limitations of space and time, the way they were always meant to be.

Healing, Amara reminds herself, and tries to let the bitterness fade from her tongue. It strikes her as easier than it once was. There is a vase full of white and yellow roses in their hotel room, and the scent seems to help, somehow.

In the morning, they go to the beach to watch the waves. A fat pink man in a flower-patterned shirt shoves her and fails to apologize, so she eats his soul for breakfast. She isn’t really hungry, but feeding is satisfying nonetheless, quiets the restlessness that continues to thrum inside her chest, pulling tighter and tighter with each name she learns.

That evening, she feels the tug of her brother’s clever fingers inside her for the first time in millenia. He slips the soul loose before she has finished consuming it, then slides it back into place in that fleshy pink body.

“Why?” she asks him, not bothering to pretend she hasn’t noticed. As always, it is Amara who questions, her brother who answers, stubborn and certain as ever.

“It wasn’t yours to take,” he says, a mulish set to his jaw. He has already decided to give no ground. “It was his, to keep or give, as he chose.”

“It was yours, you mean.” Her voice is like acid, a cold burn. Chuck has never known how to share.

He has the gall to shake his head. “No, you don’t understand. I make things, but I don’t…they aren’t _mine_. Not like—“ He breaks off, frustrated. “The child is of the father, but is not the father’s to possess. That took me a long time to learn.”

He’s right. Amara doesn’t understand. And she is tired of forever being the one who _needs_ to understand. Why is it never Chuck who is forced to twist and turn his mind into unnatural shapes trying to see as she sees, never Chuck who is commanded to alter his essential nature to earn her love, never _Chuck_ who must change for _her?_

“Sister…”

She has begun learning how to read human faces, and the one her brother wears now is pained. He has guessed her thoughts, or heard them. Once he would have known them as he knew his own. That he cannot do so now is not _her_ fault, it is _his_ , and she thinks this loudly enough—screams it at him, inside both their heads—for him to flinch.

“I wish to sleep,” she snarls at him, before he can make things worse by talking. She turns away from him and marches toward her bed, a strange, oversized thing with ruffled pillows and snow-white sheets. She had not understood at first why her brother insisted on separate beds—they had slept tangled together as one long before the invention of sleep—but now she is grateful for it. If she looks at Chuck any longer she will start wanting to eat _him_ , to stop him taking things from her, to stop him taking _himself_ from her again and again—

Stripping off her clothes with a thought, Amara yanks back the blankets and flings herself angrily onto the mattress. Sleep, she commands her body. Sleep!

Sleep does not come. She lies irritably beneath the covers, stiff as a stone and refusing to move, refusing to open her eyes to look at Chuck’s awful human face once more.

After a while, she feels the mattress dip as a warm body seats itself by her feet. A moment later the first soft, melodic notes of his silly wooden toy— _guitar_ , he had said, _it’s called a guitar_ , as if she cared a whit—drift through the room. Chuck’s singing voice is low and rough and sad, just like his laugh.

She finally slips into sleep with the slow croon of _fare thee well, oh honey_ settling somewhere deep and warm inside her chest.

When she wakes, night has already fallen, and the open windows of their room look out into darkness. A warm breeze flutters the curtains, smelling wetly of salt and flowers and making her nose itch.

Her brother is nowhere to be seen.

Amara sits up. Her back aches unpleasantly with the movement, and she frowns a little at its complaint, passing a hand across her muscles to erase the sensation. She is starting to see the appeal mortality can hold, at least at times, but that does not mean it outweighs the obvious disadvantages. Formlessness cannot ache.

“Chuck?” she says out loud. There is no answer, so she slides to her feet and says it again, more loudly. “Chuck?”

Still nothing. So she reaches out with her other voice this time, the voice that her brother is certain to hear no matter where or when he is, and calls him. But there is still no answer, and something in her human bloodstream seems to quicken in response. _He is gone,_ she thinks suddenly, not knowing where the thought is from but knowing it anyway, _he is gone, he has left me again just as he left me before, he is GONE_ —

And then the hotel door swings open and Chucks steps through, swearing softly and cradling his arm to his chest.

“CHUCK,” she says, and she sees his eyes widen as he looks at her, standing barefoot and furious (terrified) in the middle of the room, her hands fisted at her sides and her hair falling long and tangled over her shoulders and her mouth twisted into the same hard knot as the awful thing inside her chest that beats and beats and aches no matter how she tries to stop it, no matter how—

“Hey,” he says, and crosses the room in three long steps to stand before her. “Amara, hey. It’s alright.” He puts a hand on her bare shoulder, not pressing, just letting his skin rest against hers. “It’s alright.”

Amara stares at him, his soft worried eyes and his soft shaggy hair and his hard, stubborn mouth that turns down at the corners as he draws closer, watching her. “You were gone. I called you—”

“I went for coffee.”

She glares at him. “I _called_ you,” she says again, more slowly this time, still trying—still, still trying—to make him understand, “And you were _gone_.”   

His hand tightens around her shoulder, and he sighs. “Amara…”

“And you’re not holding any coffee,” she adds waspishly. The thing in her chest is still beating too fast, and her hands still feel strange and unsteady, but—stupidly, embarrassingly—the sight of her brother’s face has already begun to calm her.

“I dropped it.” He’s looking at her with that careful, thorough look she has never seen replicated on any human face but his, the look that says he has spent aeons analyzing her down to the last atom and still managed to miss her point entirely. “When I slammed my fingers in the stairwell door. That's what distracted me. It’s spilled all over the hallway.”

“Chuck,” she snaps, his name, just his name, because he doesn’t understand, he will never understand, and he isn’t even _trying,_ and for some reason that makes her eyes go hot and wet and there’s the odd, unexpected sensation of water sliding down her cheek, “Chuck—“

And then his arms are wrapped around her, drawing her in close to his human vessel, so close that she can smell the salt-scent of his skin and feel his chin press down on the hair of her head. She goes still, not knowing what this is or what to do in response, and Chuck just sighs again and holds her more tightly.

“This is called a hug,” he tells her. “Humans give them to each other when they’re sad.”

She scowls into his chest. “I am not sad.”

“You’re crying.”

“I am not crying,” she adds, though she has no idea what that means or how she would know if she was. She can feel the rumble of his laugh through his shirt. For some reason that just makes her angrier, and she tenses, preparing to pull away. But Chuck speaks first.

“I’m sorry.” His voice is so quiet she has to strain to hear. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

She scowls again, but the heat in her veins has flickered out at his words. “I am not scared.”

He laughs again, but very softly, so Amara lets him continue the hug for a few moments longer before she finally moves to disentangle them. Two of the fingers on his left hand, she notices, are oddly bent, and stained with a red fluid she recognizes—blood. She reaches out and takes hold of them as he steps back from her. “You’re hurt.”

Chuck winces faintly but doesn’t protest as she examines him, just stands there and watches with a quiet, rueful expression on his face. “I told you. I slammed them in the door.”

“Perhaps you should not have created doors,” she says flatly, but without heat.

His mouth quirks. “I can heal them myself. But I thought I might try it the long way around, for once. To remind myself of how my children manage it.”

“That sounds like something you would do,” Amara tells him. It isn’t a compliment.

But Chuck just shrugs. “I think there’s a first aid kit in the bathroom cabinet.”

Well, Amara supposes, she has put up with her brother’s strange whims this far. So she goes and gets the first aid kit from the cabinet, and brings it to him where he has seated himself on her unmade bed. When he goes to open it, though, she stops him. “No.”

His glance is a question. “No?”

She presses her lips together in a firm line and stares down at the white plastic box in her hands. “I want to do it. Show me how.”

He is quiet for so long that at first she thinks she might have said something wrong. But when she looks up, he’s smiling at her, though his eyes are as bright and damp as hers had been seconds before. “Alright,” he says. “Let me show you now to heal someone.”

It is a slow, messy business, healing. She follows his directions carefully: first cleaning the scrapes, then coating them with the clear ointment from the tube, and last the bandages. She ties them too tightly at first, making him wince, but gets it right on her second try. It will take several days for the tears in his skin to scab, he tells her, and many more for the muscle to re-knit.

When she has finished she looks at his awkwardly wrapped fingers, then bends down and, following an impulse she cannot quite name, brushes a kiss across the white cloth. He is staring at her when she straightens.

“Does it hurt?” she asks, curious.

“Yes,” he says. “It hurts.”

She nods, her throat strangely tight. “Me, too.”

“I know.” He reaches out and touches her face with his injured hand. “I know. I’m sorry.”

She surprises herself by sliding her hand gently over his, holding it in place against her cheek. “Me, too.” But the words don’t sting as they once had.

He looks at her quietly, not speaking, and at last his brown eyes slowly begin to crinkle in a smile, old and aching and tender in a way she doesn’t know how to describe. It isn’t everything she ever wanted. It isn’t all of him. But it’s enough, for now. This much of him—this silence, and this hot damp night, and this old sad smile that isn’t a smile at all, that’s just for her and no one else in this strange, ugly, beautiful world of his—is enough.

She tightens her hand on his and, carefully, smiles back.


End file.
